With the increase in the popularity of the web (or World Wide Web), more and more websites are tracking user activities browsing the web for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, such as targeted advertisements or privacy theft. Hidden websites may perform usage tracking in the background unknown to a user while the user visits a seemingly unrelated website. As a result, user privacy can be seriously compromised.
Typically, websites rely on local data storage in a device for usage tracking. For example, browser cookie is commonly used as a local storage mechanism for websites to store tracking data. Traditional privacy management tools are largely based on managing, for example, browser cookies. However, as technologies evolve, browsers are constantly updated to support new mechanisms for local storage. Thus, new opportunities of usage tracking may open up, intentionally or unintentionally, for websites to take advantage of. As a result, these traditional privacy management tools may give only a false sense of security without keeping up with the newly available mechanisms for usage tracking.
Further, modern browsers are installed with a variety of third party plug-in modules or extensions. Usually, these plug-ins are provided with their own private local storages requiring separate interfaces for external access. Thus, a browser user may be forced to individually and manually manage potential usage tracking with each private data store and/or interface. With the ever increasing number of third party plug-ins made available on daily basis, such a requirement may soon become impractical and cannot scale.
Furthermore, browser applications may provide implicit local data access mechanisms for built-in capabilities such as browser caches for caching web resources. Typically, such implicit local data access mechanisms are managed without a policy to prevent usage tracking. As a result, certain websites may be capable of identifying such loopholes to piggyback these implicit local data access mechanisms for usage tracking purposes.
Therefore, existing approaches for managing usage tracking do not provide a user with an option to control usage tracking in a unified, comprehensive and robust manner.